Welcome! The Organometallic Reader is devoted to the teaching and learning of organometallic chemistry. Quite simply, I believe that there is a better way to teach organometallic chemistry than the approach taken by the average American graduate school. Plus, you don’t need to be a chemistry whiz kid to learn organometallic chemistry! John Anthony said it best:

You don’t need to be a genius to do chemistry; you just need to be smarter than molecules.

In many respects, the molecules of organometallic chemistry are unlike any you encounter in general, organic, or inorganic chemistry. Still, they are definitely governed by general principles that come into greater focus with each passing day, and you can learn a lot about the other branches of chemistry by studying organometallics. Few fields cross so many of the traditional “divisions” of chemistry.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore the general nature of organometallic chemistry as a whole and its signature molecules, organometallic complexes. We’ll get acquainted with periodic trends of the transition metals, that large but often forgotten chunk of elements stuck in the center of the periodic table. From there, we’ll round out organometallic structure with discussions of the different classes of ligands commonly found in OM complexes. We’ll then move into the elementary mechanistic steps of organometallic chemistry, and finally we’ll put them together as we discuss organometallic reactions. Get ready for a wild ride!

Good stuff. Any chance you would be interested in contributing your content to the ChemWiki (ChemWiki.ucdavis.edu)? We are at 7M visitors/year and growing. We need some strong organometalic content to crosslink to. DSL

Hello! I’m not sure how to get in contact with you, so I’ll leave a message here. I have a new publication in the Journal of Computational Chemistry on an exact way to find the Tolman cone angle. The advantage of my method is that the sterics of a ligand can be easily quantified for any conformation. This allows the cone angle to be found for a ligand in a specific environment. All that is needed are the Cartesian coordinates and van der Waals radii. We’ve even written a Mathematica program where the user only needs to input the coordinates and the cone angle is solved for and visualized.

Since the cone angle is so often used for organometallic catalysts to try and quantify how sterics determines reactivity, I thought you would find this interesting. Below is a link for the paper and another to download the Mathematica program.

i’ll second that request. Your resource has helped me quite a bit over the the past couple years, as someone trained to count to eight I have found myself referring back to your site and topics on a semi-regular basis. i’ve printed a couple of your posts to have as reference but it would also be nice to have a consolidated resource of your topics (eg as a single pdf file or something). as you have mentioned time is easily filled with higher priority items. don’t let the blog die!